A thought provoking look at the special significance of the dimension of time in this universe.
No it’s not space, as the Star Trek credits portray, but time. We have freedom to move in the three dimensions of space but not in time, yet our science now recognises that we live in a space–time universe. Time and even space seem rather elastic when we look at Einstein’s Special Theory of Relativity, where time can slow down at increased speed. Then along comes the General Theory of Relativity and time slows down when you get near a massive object. So, on a satellite spinning fast around the earth, time runs slower due to its speed but faster because it is further from the earth’s gravity.
There is something about this that we don’t like. Einstein proposed a thought experiment to decide if we can go backward in time. If so, a man could go back in time and kill his father before he himself was born. But then he would never have been born to go back in time. Conclusion — you cannot go back in time. When I went to university, that settled it, but people, even scientists, still want to toy with the idea. All Newton’s laws dictating the motion of matter through space contain time, but time is always elapsed time; always forwards. All chemical equations move forward and never backwards. Time seemed to come with an arrow. Though it appears equally as a dimension, our existence is bound to the forward direction.
Eventually scientists started to understand something they called entropy, or disorder. Everything tends to move (over time) to a higher state of disorder or chaos. I found it interesting, though perhaps ill-conceived, to see how some scientists predict the end of the universe as heat death. In this scenario, all heat sources (suns) exhaust their energy and everything drops to the same temperature and without the flow of heat, there can be no energy to do anything. (I find it strange that this is close to the state after the inflation phase of the Big Bang, where all matter is evenly distributed and seemingly at the same temperature.) I was listening to a theoretical physicist muse on about this heat death and he seemed uncomfortable that time just kept on going even though all matter was sucked into black holes, so he mused that the black hole itself would evaporate.
Steady state theories, where the universe exists forever seems to be dismissed because it seemed obvious that the stars would eventually burn all their fuel. So there must have been something to start the universe. Hence they mused that time and space and matter all started in the Big Bang. For a while they thought the universe was closed and it would all end with a big crunch. But that does not look correct now.
Some scientists were still unhappy with the philosophical implications of their own statements. Warning: scientists are not the least bit qualified in philosophy and they now blur scientific reality with their expectations and propose weirder and weirder options to resolve their dilemma. For example, the universe seems to be expanding, that is new space is appearing between the galaxies. Note, the galaxies are not moving away from each other but new space is appearing. This is supplemented by mythical dark matter to hold the galaxies together and fuelled by equally undetectable dark energy to cause the expansion. But because all the galaxies will suffer heat death I have heard that some scientists now propose that perhaps new matter will also appear to enable the universe to exist for some indefinite time.
We need a reality check to sort out what is happening. Suppose Johnny has one apple and Freddy has no apples. Then Johnny gives Freddy two apples. An accountant; a mathematician and a theoretical physicist will tell you that Johnny ends up with -1 apples while Freddy has 2 apples. But an experimental physicist, any mum or primary school student will tell you that -1 apples is an illegal or unachievable state—it just cannot happen.
To be sure that weird stuff does temporarily happen at the quantum level but we are talking about the cosmic level.
As it happens, science often reverts to unknowns to explain what they don’t understand. Here are some examples:
Light, like sound was considered to be a waveform. It had diffraction patterns predicted by the same mathematics that describe waveforms but waves had to have some medium, typically air or water, to pass through. So when light was seen to pass through a vacuum there was a problem. Scientists postulated that something they call aether “had to be there”. Later however, they detected mass like properties of light and finally realises that light was a particle, a photon, and the Uncertainty Principle explained how the apparent wavelike properties were derived from probability distributions.
The orbit of Mercury, the closest planet to the sun seemed to have minute errors. They could only explain these errors by assuming that some other planet or planetary debris was in a closer orbit to the sun. This planet could not be detected but “had to be there”. When the General Theory of Relativity came along the calculations were no longer in error and they no longer needed this other planet.
Galaxies are spinning too fast. There is not enough detectable mass inside a galaxy to hold it together (for assumed billions of years). OK, there must be undetectable (hence dark) matter present. Oops ...this myth is still alive and kicking, but it will die once a better model is presented without the incorrect assumptions.
All this is sort of fun to study. Because the Bible declares that God is a God of order and not chaos and because He laid out laws and statutes for man to live by, then Christian scientists started out with a world view where they were simply searching out the rules that God had laid down for creation and they could be sure that they were permanent and unchanging because God had declared that “He does not change”. Science flourished in the West, under Judeo-Christian ethics.
Of course God is the creator of this universe. His word makes it clear that this universe will have an end. Time will end! God also declares His sovereignty over time, because even when the world is in rebellion against Him, He is able to see into the future and declare things that are yet to come before they take place.
Well, all this musing was pleasant. I think modern science has bought into unimaginably long time and cannot (will not) even contemplate solutions to the universe that involve a rapid formation. That is a unique aspect of the COI universe. And not only is it rapid but it is structured right from the start of time which is exactly what you would expect in a universe where the time and thermodynamics all moves towards maximum disorder.
Then there is all that confusion about the end of the universe. Will it collapse back to a singularity or will it expand forever? Will it internally suffer heat death or will some magical process feed more matter to regenerate the universe? Right now, popular models for the birth of the universe are clearly wrong because they cannot account for the current state. If you cannot account for what is, then you’re really in day dream land when it comes to what will be!
The COI Model can account for what we see today. The COI model is a closed universe and left to itself might collapse eventually, but here is the twist ...We are at the centre of the universe which smacks of a privileged place. Further, our galaxy is very young in the COI model. The unimaginably long time has been removed and that means that there is no time for an evolutionary type process to create life if it ever could.
The COI model paints this universe as a simple transformation of something else, a matter–space universe, when time started. There really is something else, and not just a something, but a somewhere and someone else that initiated this transformation. There is a reason and a purpose and a goal for the transformation that occurred, and when this purpose is achieved, time will end and this universe along with it.
...No scientist can discover that somewhere and someone else by peering down a microscope or a telescope. Only someone who has been there and come here can tell you. The only such person in all of history that has been, or will ever be, is Jesus.
Further, more informed reading about the problems facing modern science, with excellent technical links, can be found in “The Creation Answers book”, chapter 5. This is available free on-line at:
CMI has many fascinating articles, but “Five atheist miracles” is one that beautifully shows the flaws in man’s thinking when he tries to invent a universe and life without a Creator.
If somehow you got here without first seeing the COI Overview, then please look there.
Hopefully you have already grasped the significance of God’s Timetable. If you want to know more about Jesus, then you need to see The Way Back.
Late update: This article was written before I commenced work on the book “Where Time Begins”. That book and the physics used to derive the Universe’s gravitational field resulted in some changes to the technical understanding of the COI model. For example, the age of the Milky Way galaxy is more like a billion years, rather than a million or so years. I also proposed several ways that the pre-history of the COI universe may have unfolded. But this article still has value. I have left it pretty much as it was before my focus switched to “Where Time Begins”, as technical proof of the COI process.